A differentiated energy Kuznets curve: Evidence from mainland China

Highlights: • Energy consumption patterns form the differentiated EKCs in mainland China's provinces. • Energy consumption is still the dominant factor driving mainland China's economic development. • Technical progress will become the main driving force for socioeconomic development. The differentiated research of energy consumption has important practical and theoretical significance. For this purpose, this paper constructs a differentiated energy Kuznets curve (EKC) and a Cobb-Douglas production function based on provincial time series data to analyse the evolution of the influential mechanism on mainland China's economic development. Mainland China's energy intensity first increases and then decreases and shows an asymmetric inverted U-shaped curve. There are also significant differences in various provinces' EKCs. The starting points, inflection points and evolution trajectories of these EKCs are different among mainland China's provinces. When the economic level at the inflection point is higher, the energy intensity will be lower. The reason for these differences in various provinces' EKCs is that the unit energy consumption variation (UE) and the total energy consumption increase value (TE) in various Class production functions are different. Specifically, the contribution of energy input and technical progress to economic development is significant, while energy consumption is still the factor that drives economic development in most of mainland China's provinces.